


History and Harry Watson

by Queertrees



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cigarettes, F/F, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Minor Character Death, Swearing, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:14:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queertrees/pseuds/Queertrees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From Harry's point of view, she's always been a mess. Not like her little brother. So what's she to do when he's more broken than she is?</p>
            </blockquote>





	History and Harry Watson

I thought you were going to die, John. I thought you were going to bloody die.

The first time I remember your disappointment I was 15. Already going round with Clara, but no one knew that yet. She and I were always getting pissed behind the school gym. She hid cigarettes in the elastic of her stockings. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. You were still such a little kid, even though you were only a few years younger than me. I envied your faith in people, in the world. I’d come home stinking of cheap perfume, sprayed on to disguise the smells of cigs and weed and beers and Clara’s cunt.  You came into my room cos you couldn’t sleep and I held my hand up to you. I was painting my nails black, but my head was spinning and I was making a mess of it. You used to like all the different colours I made my nails and my hair. You thought it was funny. You thought I was cool. But this time you just looked at the smeared, lumpy varnish on my nails and cuticles, at the sloppy smile smeared across my pimply face, and you frowned a bit and rolled your eyes.

“You fucked that right up, Harry,” you told me. Who the fuck cared if I messed my damn nails up.

As we got older you started acting more and more like you were my dad. Well, not like _our_ dad, but acting like I was the younger one that needed taking care of. You were worse than Clara. Lecturing me for days after I got in trouble for taking the piss out of that copper. Practically tried to lock me in the house when I left school. I’d laugh in your face and call you a little twerp and muss up your hair and tell you to piss off. Couldn’t make me do a thing. No one could. Not your lecturing, nor dad’s screaming, nor mum’s shaming, not even Clara’s pleading when it eventually came to that. You’d do that _thing_. That strong and silent thing- God how I hated it- you’d grit your teeth and stand up even straighter and grow steely-eyed and cold. Acting so superior. But you never understood. You couldn’t. At least, not back then. Maybe you do now, who knows. You certainly wouldn’t tell me if it’s true. Probably won’t ever even tell him. I wonder if he’s clever enough to see through your steely reprimanding eyes.

I wish I could say you were never there for me. At least I’d have some pride then. But you were. You never looked at me the way mum did when I came out. You came with me to look at flats when Clara was busy with school. You didn’t say anything while I was packing my bags, you didn’t join in with my vitriol and curses against them, but you were there. Taking my jeans and jumpers out and folding them before putting them back in my case, pairing my socks and yes, slipping two weeks worth of your wages from that tutoring job into my coat pocket while I wasn’t looking. You tried to talk them round, I know. Took them a few years to speak to me again, even with their perfect son sticking up for me.

It was such a cliché, wasn’t it? The perfect boy. Hard-working student, on his way to uni. Going to be a _doctor_ , of course you were. “And what’s _she_?” Mum cackled, drunk on Bacardi Breezers at your birthday. You rolled your eyes and hushed her angrily before she could tell all her crimson-clawed and orange-faced friends just what she thought I was. They listened to you. They deplored of me. And I ran with that goddawful cliché of the wild one, the fuckup, the drunken troublemaker.

I couldn’t believe it when you went into the army. God, the names I called you. You told me last of anyone. Not surprisingly, after all those protests I went to. After every family get-together in the past few years had ended with dad and me having it out about politics and what a bunch of cocks I think the government is made up of. It was when you graduated medical school. I’d taken you out to a pub to celebrate and some tosser tried to pick a fight with you. Calling you a fairy cos you didn’t have a bird with you. (You could have, of course, but I knew you. Whatever girl you ever brought around always looked worse when you compared her to Clara, I knew it. Have to say I liked it. At least that was something I had up on you.) You wouldn’t fight him, cos you were above all that, obviously, so I got in the middle of the two of you and told the wanker if he wanted a fight he could see me about it. He said he wasn’t going to hit a woman so I flicked my cigarette in his face and he was about to change his mind, but you pulled me out of there. Took me outside and told me you didn’t need me protecting you, that you’d joined up.  

I guess I got worse after that. Got better first- cleaned up and asked Clara to marry me. Got a job and kept it- well, kept it for more than a month at least. Tried to not be a total waste. Even invited mum and dad to the wedding. I don’t know if you were sad when I asked Twitchy to be my best man instead of you. You found me hiding in the gents with a bottle of Glenfiddich, and went all steely-eyed and tight-jawed again. You ended up driving us all home, Twitchy and me passed out in the back and Clara up front with you.

You invited her to the party, the night before you shipped out, but not me. She and I were ‘on a break,’ in her terms, but I saw pictures on her Facebook that night. You and her and your uni friends and your stupid army pals doing shots together and dancing like idiots. Well, you didn’t dance. You never did- you were terrible at it. She did, though. She loved dancing.

I called you that night, five in the morning, pissed off my arse and screaming at you. Saying you were trying to fuck my wife. Saying I didn’t care if I never saw you again.

“Harry,” you said, and you sounded so sad and it made me so furious, “You might not.” I threw my mobile against a brick wall and it burst into a thousand pieces.  

You were gone for so, so long. And then dad showed up at my door one day and told me about mum. He was so bent and old by then, I didn’t have the strength to keep fighting him. I came home and cooked their meals, called the doctors for them. That kept me sober for a while, I can tell you. But she faded so fast. Missing you to the last. If we knew how fast we’d lose her maybe they would have let you come home. Maybe if we knew dad was going to have a bloody stroke on the way home from her funeral, maybe they’d have given you leave. Dad only lasted for a week after that. I was back at the off-license in a day.

Clara and I tried to make up time and time again. She gave me a flash new mobile once to try to make things better. It didn’t work.

You came home, eventually. We tried to make up. I gave you my flash new mobile to try to make things better. It didn’t work.

When you first came back, I tried to let you think I was sober. But everything in you was so dead. You weren’t even able to look excited about it, or hopeful that I wasn’t lying. That light in your eyes, that faith, that trust in the world, it was gone. And if _you_ could lose it, if the world was so bad that it could take that away from _you_ , where was the hope for a fuckup like me?

I thought you must have died and they’d just sent home a bomb in your clothes.

I guess that was why I didn’t tell you about him. I saw the light coming back to you. You were excited about something, about someone, for the first time in so, so long.

It wasn’t his name I recognized. Well, he never told me his name. It was while you were away. I was leaving some girl’s flat one morning. I was a wreck and I stopped in the park to smoke and clear my head. I thought he was a kid at first, that’s why I shook him awake. This wasn’t a good park to be sleeping rough in, it was a posh street and someone was bound to report him. Once he sat up I could see he was older than I thought at first. And I could see he was even more fucked up than I was. I’d known kids like him. Itchy little liars, I always thought. I suppose I was lonely, though, so I gave him a smoke and offered to buy him a pasty. He didn’t want one, but told me all this shit about myself. Completely uncalled for, I thought, but he was right about it all the same. About Clara, about the girl I’d pulled last night, which agency I was temping that month, how I was good at darts. I laughed at him and called him a clever little arsehole.

“I’m right, though, aren’t I?” I told him he was and passed him my flask. _That_ he didn’t say no to. We finished it off between us then I told him it was time to piss off. We went our separate ways, me to shower and go to work and get fired, him to god knows where. Didn’t see him again till years later, when I met you for coffee downstairs from your new flat. I’d been reading your blog and I told you I wasn’t leaving till you introduced me to your new boyfriend. You rolled your eyes, like always, and told me he wasn’t your boyfriend, and that he was out. But I didn’t take no for an answer. Anyone that gave you something to believe in again, I wasn’t going to budge until I met them. That wasn’t how I put it to you, of course. So we went upstairs and the old woman who lives below you brought us tea and biscuits and then he came home. He kept looking at me funny so I think it took him a while to place me. Either that or it’s just his face. He didn’t say anything about it, though. But when you went down to bring the old lady back her tray, I told him that if he thought he was going to pull any fuckup bullshit with my brother, he damn well better watch himself. That if he ever hurt you like _I’d_ hurt you, that I’d kill him. He blinked at me for a while and then told me he was clean.

“More than can be said about you,” he said. I was going to give him what for, but you came back in just then and we both gave you big fake smiles and waited to see if the other would mention anything to you. Neither of us did.

I thought about telling you. You looked at him like some awestruck child. It had been decades since you looked at _me_ like I was the coolest person ever, and I thought if I told you, then even if you couldn’t ever see me like that again, at least you wouldn’t see anyone else like that either. But even my bitter heart has its limits.

These days, you’re always off doing some vaguely illegal shit with him. You! Straight and narrow John. You always blush so hard when I take the piss out of you about it- how you used to be so appalled at my run-ins, and here are you getting arrested for graffiti of all things!

So I never told you. And if he- that itchy little smart-arse I’d found on the nod on a park bench- if _he_ could bring that light back into your eyes… Maybe I still feel like if he can do it, maybe this fuckup has a chance, too.


End file.
